Читать книгу Beyond Soul Growth - Lynn Sparrow Christy - Страница 31

So far, we have considered only a broad and rather crude dividing point between what is manifest and what is non-manifest, what is form and what is formlessness. But of course dividing lines are human inventions, something that makes the oneness of all graspable to a human mind. On the color spectrum we go from red to orange to yellow, for example, while in reality there is an unbroken gradation between what we call red and what we call orange and again between what we call orange and what we call yellow. At what point has the color stopped being red and started being orange? Where along the spectrum do we leave orange and first meet yellow? We can divide sound frequencies into musical notes, but what about the infinitesimal stages of slowing or speeding up that fall between every note? Furthermore, beyond the infinite gradations in every type of spectrum we can perceive, there are those ranges above and below what our human senses are equipped to pick up. More amazing still, who, from the evidence of their senses, would have guessed that color and sound are segments of one continuous spectrum?

When we realize how artificial are the lines we draw, it becomes less likely that what we perceive in three-dimensional matter is the whole of manifestation. It is far more likely that all of manifestation is a graded spectrum from the most dense to the most ephemeral. As theosophist C.W. Rogers explains it,

The mental world, or sphere, or plane, of theosophy, is a world of matter, not merely thought. It is matter, however, of such remarkable tenuosity that it may properly be called mind-stuff, and in its rarest levels it is said to be “formless” so far as the existence of what the physical senses know as form is concerned.⁵⁶

These higher levels of the spectrum of manifestation may not be easily apparent even to those who have experienced advanced meditative states of consciousness, which may at least partially explain why there is virtually no mention of them in the discussions and literature of contemporary evolutionary spirituality. Yet the esteemed Sri Aurobindo admits that “I had experience of Nirvana and Silence in Brahman long before I had any knowledge of the overhead spiritual planes.”⁵⁷ Spiritual though these planes may be, the very fact that they are layered expressions of spirit makes them, by definition, part of form rather than formlessness. By analogy, the formless ground of being would be that from which and in which the entire spectrum has its being. It would lead us into a digression far outside our field of concern in this book to go into descriptions of the many planes of non-material and yet manifest existence described in the esoteric literature. For our purposes, let's just say that these unseen worlds are said to exist the same way that frequencies of light or sound exist beyond the range of human eyes and ears. They form an orderly progression, with those just beyond the material plane being its progressively less dense replicas.

It is on these planes that souls' earliest entanglements began and on these planes the earliest threads of so-called ancient wisdom began as well. (As a refinement to the simple manifest/unmanifest scheme depicted in Figure 2, please refer to Figure 3 for a graphic, albeit limited, depiction of this point.) For the path of evolution is only part of the story. As told in the Cayce readings and much of the esoteric tradition, before we can have evolution, involution first must take place—that is, a descent of spirit through a graded spectrum of ever-more-dense levels of manifestation (involution) precedes that process wherein that spirit awakens to itself in matter (evolution). The beginnings of ancient wisdom can be traced to knowledge held before spirit became completely engulfed in matter. It is quite a story.

Multi-DImensional Form and Formlessness

Please note again that this model attempts to put into visual form that which is beyond all depiction. With that in mind, imagine that the page on which this is printed represents timeless, spaceless, unlimited reality and that not only the 3-dimensional world of form, but every dimension beyond the 3rd as well, is just another aspect of the Absolute's manifestation in form.

Figure 3